Category: Euro Truck Simulator 2

ProMods 2.50 Previews: Baltics

Posted on | by Stummer | 4 Comments on ProMods 2.50 Previews: Baltics

Welcome to this week’s preview, which focuses on the Baltics. ProMods 2.50 sees the return of more pre-Baltic DLC areas that have been upgraded or even completely rebuilt, as well as changes to reflect road upgrades only recently carried out in the real world.

Estonia

Returning to Estonia is the island of Saaremaa and the connections to the existing road network on the mainland. Our Estonian developer martinusK is working hard to rebuild old ProMods areas in Estonia to today’s standards, so that they integrate well with the Baltic DLC content. He has this to say about the area:

“Estonia’s always stood firm by its naval heritage and what better example of it than the Western Estonian archipelago. Saaremaa, once home to our very own Vikings (Oeselians), has always had a distinct, although still strongly Estonian identity. Its people are tough and as history has shown, quite rebellious, surely being hardened by the Kaali meteorite strike in 1500BC. Saaremaa will have a total of six scenery or functional ports, and several companies are also navally oriented. The island will also have some of the smallest roads in Estonia, surrounded by typical thick pine forests – not that the Saaremaa-native reigning World Rally Champion would’ve been slowed down by that.
Personally: although I’ve lived my whole life on the mainland, Saaremaa will always be a special place for me. After all, I even get funny looks by my mates for speaking the dialect!”

Lithuania

Now on to Lithuania, where developer Horizon has been busy. Panevėžys, locally known as the capital of Aukštaitija, has recently upgraded the A17 highway, which acts as an international freight and travel corridor through the Baltic States as part of the E67 route between Prague and Helsinki. A majority of the work by SCS has been replaced to provide a more true-to-life rendition of the highway in the world of ETS2. As in the real world, configurations of 2+1 lanes were added (commonly seen in Sweden), as well as turbo roundabouts, of which there are only a few examples in the ProMods map. Lastly, the addition of three new companies to the city will enhance the game economy.

Also making a return is the Curonian Spit. Horizon provides the following details:

“The Curonian Spit: Lithuania’s most attractive tourist hotspot due to its nature, beaches and UNESCO World Heritage Site of fascinating sand-dunes that stretch across the thin landmass. In the world of ETS2, you will be able to drive across from the city of Klaipėda to traverse this piece of land and the coastal village of Juodkrantė.”

“The comeback of the Curonian spit will feature a mix of refurbished and brand-new sections built under new standards, in addition to completely changed ferry locations from past versions. On both sides of the ferry crossing, I have replicated the port as closely as possible to the real-world, for e.g. the current renovations, in addition to changing part of the city and its layout to get sophisticated results.”

Kaliningrad Oblast

Of course, the Curonian Spit is shared between Lithuania and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. Vladzz-G has upgraded the connection from the border to Kaliningrad, via the town of Zelenogradsk, with assets from the Baltic DLC, restoring another area that was originally released in ProMods 2.10.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing this preview. There is still plenty more to come, so keep your eyes peeled for the next one!

ProMods 2.50 Previews: UK

Posted on | by Stummer | 15 Comments on ProMods 2.50 Previews: UK

Welcome to what is already the fifth ProMods 2.50 preview. This week we are taking a look at the changes coming to the UK, which has seen one of the largest overhauls yet: four cities brand new or rebuilt from the ground up, two dozen cities reskinned, and a large portion of the UK road network upgraded in some way. We’ll start with the southwest of England, specifically the county of Devon, where all content in 2.50 is either new or rebuilt.

Plymouth and Exeter

As we saw in last week’s preview, ProMods is far from a one man job. Plymouth is another great example of that. Back in 2016, IvanGF14 started with the basic layout of this large port city. He planned it ambitiously and was very motivated. Sadly, because of spare time issues, he couldn’t continue his project and so it was put on hold for the time being. Years later, developer Plum decided, together with his Exeter project, to finish Plymouth. Plymouth is a vast city requiring a lot of work, so developer FisherJB decided to help him on the industrial part of the city (once his own project in the Balkans was finished). After Plum finished Exeter, he took over development again from FisherJB and finished his areas and the road to the city’s port, going right through the city centre. But that wasn’t the end. A city without signs doesn’t look realistic or pretty, that is where Mandelsoft, ScuL and Dawid2849 came into action and did a fabulous job. After a lot of time the city is finally completed and you can enjoy the screenshots here, and drive it yourself in the near future.

Plum has some more details:

Plymouth was no easy city to make, it was a challenge. One of the hardest parts was making the road to the port right through the heart of the city. Currently there aren’t a huge number of high quality assets in the game for British city centres, yet with lots of hard work I managed to make something which represents the city centre. Sure, not every building will look identical to its real life counterpart, but there are lots of landmarks which locals will recognise, such as Charles Church in the middle of a roundabout, an anchor made out of flowers near the city centre and much more. The port itself also got a complete rebuild making it as accurate as possible, where you will be able to recognise a lot. By far the hardest challenge though was getting the view from the A38, which cuts right through the city. The fact you can drive deep into Marsh Hills retail park and the industrial estate made it a challenge to optimize too, yet the results are staggering.

Exeter was also a major addition to the South West. The city of 130000 is a centre for business and tourism in Devon, and so was an important addition to include in the UK. In game, Exeter has likely one of the most complex prefabs in the game – namely Junction 29 on the M5 which MandelSoft worked hard on for several weeks to make it highly accurate compared to its real life counterpart. Along with this, Exeter has many recognisable landmarks such as the River Exe, Exeter Airport and more. Below you can see some screenshots of the city.

For those who haven’t seen, some time ago Plum made some cinematics showcasing his work. You can check them out here:

Cambridge and Norwich

We now cross the width of England to the region of East Anglia, where longtime UK developer cashtime2013 has extended the road network and built the region’s largest city, Norwich.

As well as enjoying the view of the cathedral puncturing the city’s skyline, you can look forward to the dirt road to reach a sawmill, which he tried to make both challenging and scenic.

Cashtime has also completely rebuilt the university city of Cambridge. His favourite spot is the view across the river.

Rather than connecting Norwich to the rest of the UK with just one or two roads, a proper representation of the key road network has been created, so you can enjoy an authentic driving experience through rural Norfolk and Suffolk with a choice of route.

UK-wide reskins

There are multiple possible levels of improving an existing part of the map. At one end, the whole area can be deleted and rebuilt from the ground up, as has happened in Exeter, and is effectively brand new content. Sometimes, the basic road layout can be kept, but almost every other aspect is upgraded.

Then, at the softer end, are what we call reskins or refreshes. The goal with these is to get the maximum improvement for the time and effort invested. Swapping out map elements in place can make a remarkable difference: just by replacing ground and road textures, building and vegetation models, interchange and company prefabs, and upgrading the signs, an old area can be made to look ‘nearly new’. Of course, the results are not as impressive as a complete rebuild, but they take a fraction of the time.

This is exactly what cashtime2013 and Plum have done in the UK, making use of the shorter time requirements to refresh a large portion of the country. Shown below are 20 (!) cities which have received this treatment, covering both vanilla cities which were long overdue an upgrade, and older ProMods content which has been brought up to today’s standards.

Large parts of the road network have also been refreshed, with old single-prefab interchanges replaced and landscapes made more realistic. If only we had unlimited developers with unlimited time, we could rebuild everything to the highest possible standards. But in the real world, the reskin/refresh strategy is the best way to improve large areas of the oldest parts of the map at once.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back again next week.

ProMods 2.50 Previews: Poland

Posted on | by Stummer | 13 Comments on ProMods 2.50 Previews: Poland

This week we are taking a look at the new and improved areas in Poland. ProMods 2.50 brings the most changes in Poland in several years. Over half a dozen developers have contributed in one way or another. We are really excited to show you what’s changed, and there’s a lot to get through, so let’s dive right into it.

We start in the north, where Lynx21 has rebuilt the port city of Gdynia. He provided the following context:

From a small fishing village to a huge shipping port in 15 years? That was the case with Gdynia in the 1920’s when the Polish government decided to build the city from scratch. The city is a great example of modernist and communist architecture. Massive housing estates built mostly in the 70’s and 80’s are an inseparable part of the city’s panorama. Gdynia with its 250,000 inhabitants now has one of the biggest Baltic ports and remains vital for the Polish economy. In-game you will notice remarkable landmarks such as Sea Towers, Radmor Offices, Gdynia Powerplant and BCT Facility.

Next we move to the northeast, and Horizon’s city of Suwałki. The city has received refurbishment and a new expressway section of the S61 which bypasses the town, which was constructed for the purposes of relieving the city from international traffic on the E67 route. We are pleased to present this new road in-game while its real-life counterpart was only opened last year! The town itself will have enhanced aesthetics, such as more detailed textures, vegetation and various buildings, that were replaced with Baltic DLC assets.

The first brand new, rather than rebuilt, city we’re covering today is Piotrków Trybunalski. The favourite areas of the main developer, jdenm8, are the Kaarfor Warehouse (shown in screenshot) and the big interchanges with the A1.

Back to rebuilds now, and our lead developer MandelSoft has been at work in the southern city of Opole and its surroundings. He provided some slightly more technical details about his decisions and workflow:

Many of us know that many parts of Poland were outdated. I wanted to make my contribution to the renewal of Poland, by starting with just one city that could use a lot of improvement. In this area, Opole caught my attention. The city itself was not looking like anything from real life, so a complete rebuild would improve this region massively. However, the roads which the city connects to only had to be refurbished a bit.

For this city, I tried to approach it like how SCS would approach it. Usually, this means avoiding the city center because the delivery points for trucks are often located on the outskirts, and often this helps to optimise performance. I focussed mainly on the DK46 bypass and the company delivery points in the north, and did my best to deliver top quality work with the help of the latest assets at the time – mainly from the Baltic DLC – and the latest techniques – most of the landscape is crafted with the new vertex tool instead of bezier patches – to deliver an aesthetically pleasing and technically clean scenery. The only planned area I had to skip is the power plant, due to a lack of assets for it at the time. The cooling towers of this power plant are, however, prominently visible as background scenery.

The Kielce rebuild is another project headed up by Lynx21, and it’s clear from his description of the region that he’s really proud of his work here:

If you’ve ever been to Świętokrzyskie province you already know it has one of the best landscapes in Europe representing huge hilly fields. While not being very populated, the area has so much to offer. Here we want to focus on the city of Kielce – the capital of the province. Along with Poznań – Kielce is a city of large expo events. Located near the S7 and S74 expressways and with a population of 195,000, the city is a major transport hub in the area. As in almost every Polish city you’ll find these massive blocks of flats but do not let it discourage you from noticing the details of their surroundings! Well-known Kielce landmarks you will find in the game include: Galeria Echo Mall, Skanska-Comarch Offices, County’s Hall, City’s University and the Expo Centre.

The final areas of major changes in 2.50 are east and southeast of Lublin, primarily developed by FH-Fahrer, PapierSUHD and Lynx21. The connection to Zamość has been rebuilt as far as the town of Krasnystaw, while the DK12 heads east – first to the city of Chełm, but then on to the border with another country with a large amount of new content in ProMods 2.50 (stay tuned for the blog post on that!).

As you can see from the screenshots, the new content in Poland is full of small details, such as specific buildings and adverts, that go beyond today’s highest standards and make the scenery especially realistic and recognisable compared to real life. In addition to the main map developers already mentioned, this is possible thanks to the specialist prefab and signage work, and general mapping assistance, of Vøytek, Dawid2849, elot360PL and HixoPL.

And we have still not covered everything! There are multiple smaller stretches of rebuilt roads and new scenery towns and villages across Poland. While we can’t include it all, we had to show this screenshot from a roundabout in the far southeast of the country, which Lynx21 summed up perfectly as having a ‘Polish spirit’.

With that, thanks for reading this week’s preview, and we’ll see you again for the next one.